Gonzaga redshirt junior guard Braeden Smith is going to Notre Dame. He committed yesterday, and coach Micah Shrewsberry is probably the happiest coach in the Atlantic Coast Conference right now. Shrewsberry just landed a proven point guard with two years in one of the nation’s best programs and the kind of floor IQ that programs like the Fighting Irish usually have to build from scratch. Good for Shrewsberry. Good for Smith.
It still stings a little.
Not because of anything he did wrong — quite the opposite. It’s all the stuff he did right, and still the circumstances made leaving the only logical move. The injuries nobody could’ve seen coming. The roster math. The shifting geometry of the offense. One thing cascading into another until the point guard who came here specifically to run this offense found himself without an offense to run. No Zag this season had the circumstances conspire against him more completely than Braeden Smith. That’s worth saying clearly before he’s gone.
Braeden Smith developed into a legitimate prospect at Seattle Prep without anyone in the recruiting services noticing, and came out of the 2022 class completely unranked. As a freshman at Colgate he averaged 11.6 points, 3.9 rebounds, and 4.4 assists on 48.1% shooting, made the All-Rookie Team, and was a National Freshman of the Year finalist. As a sophomore he expanded everything: 12.5 points, 5.5 rebounds, 5.6 assists, Patriot League Player of the Year (the first sophomore to win it in a decade), and Patriot League Tournament MVP after averaging 16 points, nine assists and five rebounds across three postseason wins. High-major programs came calling the moment he entered the transfer portal.
He chose Gonzaga knowing full well he was walking into a redshirt year behind Ryan Nembhard, and a year was probably the right amount of time — Nembhard’s operation of the offense was that sophisticated. Smith sat, worked the iPad, learned the system, and waited. The hope was continuity, maybe with a tighter scoring focus and more physical rebounding than Gonzaga ever got from Nembhard. Through no fault of his own, that opportunity never materialized..
It’s ultimately a pretty tragic story. He earned the job through the most unglamorous possible path, and gave up a full season to mentor under the best floor general in program history, and when it was time to be handed the keys to the kingdom, it turned out the kingdom needed a different kind of point guard. The circumstances of his debut season rearranged themselves in ways that had nothing to do with how hard he’d prepared.
How the Season Turned Against Him
Braden Huff dislocated his kneecap on January 14th averaging 17.8 points on 66% shooting, and the offense he helped anchor effectively died with him. Gonzaga was built to run high pick-and-roll to a dominant big, run a secondary action to the other dominant big, and kick back to the perimeter if things got bogged down inside. In short, let a point guard orchestrate the first, second, and third actions. That’s the offense Smith spent a year learning to run. Without Huff, it became largely unavailable.
Unfortunately, the personnel around Smith couldn’t compensate for the offense lost with Huff’s injury. Adam Miller never stepped into the Nolan Hickman role, never stretched a defense consistently enough to give Smith lanes to work with the way Nembhard had. Jalen Warley was dangerous in transition but largely neutralized in the half-court offense, then he picked up a severe thigh contusion in early February and was barely functional as an offensive contributor the rest of the way. What the Zags were left with was triage: let Ike go to work in the post, put Fogle and Grant-Foster in iso-sets and hope they cook, live on offensive rebounds and put-backs. That’s not an offense a facilitating point guard has much to do with. Smith’s assist-to-turnover ratio was a tidy 3.3. He wasn’t the problem. The offense he was brought there to run just wasn’t the offense this year’s team had the personnel or skill profile necessary to execute.
The flashes were real and they were jaw-dropping at times. A 21-point, 7-assist, 7-of-10 shooting night against Oregon in December. Fifteen points on 6-of-6 shooting against Portland in February. Nine assists at Arizona State. Seven assists and zero turnovers against Michigan. His 46.7% from the field in 17 minutes a night is not a backup’s number. On his best nights, Braeden Smith was exactly what Gonzaga hoped he’d be.
Smith averaged 5.1 points and 3.6 assists in 17 minutes. Extrapolate those assist numbers to 35 minutes and you’re looking at something close to 7.5 per 40. His 46.7% from the field was efficient for a guard at his volume. His 3.3 assist-to-turnover ratio was the best among rotation guards on the team. He was making plays, protecting the ball, and running a functional offense out of a roster that was in triage for half the season.
Then Braden Huff’s kneecap exploded.
When Huff went down, the offense needed someone who could manufacture something when the right play wasn’t there. Saint-Supery is volatile by nature, unpredictable off the dribble, capable of creating a bucket for himself or a teammate out of nothing.
That volatility, which looked like a liability early in the season, became an asset the moment the high-low offense rendered the Zags’ scoring attack one dimensional. You can’t run a Fogle iso set, a Grant-Foster dive to the rim, or a Warley offensive rebound with a pure facilitator at the point.
Smith is a system point guard. Literally, that’s what he was brought here and trained to do. He makes a structure hum. The structure was gone, and Few needed someone who could improvise alongside the rogues’ gallery of improvisers he had left. That was Saint-Supery. It wasn’t a reflection of what Smith is, it was a reflection of what this particular kind of roster math demanded.
And for a guy in his position, with his skills, next year wasn’t shaping up to be any easier. Ike, Warley, Grant-Foster, Miller, and Venters: all gone. Gonzaga is rebuilding from scratch, and asking Smith to step in and manage another year of running an offense whose character we cannot even begin to speculate at would’ve been its own kind of unfair. He wasn’t brought here to do that. Mark Few is doubling down on Saint-Supery, the roster is turning over entirely, and Smith deserves a situation built around what he actually is. Notre Dame is precisely that situation.
Following a weekend visit and on-campus workout for the UW Huskies, there was real talk of Smith landing at Washington, alongside departed Steele Venters. As a Seattle kid himself, it made obvious sense, the Huskies also lost Zoom Diallo, JJ Mandaquit, and Courtland Muldrew all to the portal. A hometown guy with two NCAA Tournaments on his resume and two years of high-major experience would’ve been a straightforward sell. But Washington started casting a wider net, including interest in San Francisco guard Ryan Beasly. Smith instead went a different direction entirely.
Notre Dame ranks 41st in this cycle’s transfer portal rankings and they’re not close to being done rebuilding. They lost seven players this year, including Markus Burton to Indiana and Jalen Haralson to Tennessee, and have so far brought in three; Smith is their highest-rated addition so far. Head Coach Micah Shrewsberry needs a point guard who has actually run a program before, and Notre Dame is going to build something around him. Sort of exactly the situation Braeden Smith was brought in to helm at Gonzaga.
Ultimately, Smith’s departure is a tough one to swallow. It always sucks to lose a beloved Zag, but losing Innocenti, Diagne, and Venters made sense on their own terms. Smith’s departure, though, comes down to bad luck and a season that became something nobody designed it to be. For his entire career in Spokane, Smith was patient. He was diligent. He showed up every night with an iPad and studied an offense that this year’s injury report eventually made obsolete. He did everything right. The circumstances just changed and the Zags needed to adapt. And none of it is Braeden Smith’s fault.
The hope is that he goes on to have the best season of his career in the ACC with the keys to the offense firmly in his own grip, the very thing he was trained for in the first place. Hopefully South Bend is where all the diligence and focus he put in for Gonzaga starts to pay dividends for a guy who’s shown so much grit and humility in his time in Spokane.
If nothing else, Zag fans have a good reason to invest a little time and attention into ACC basketball this year.
